SENATE APPROVES YUCCA PROJECT

The Senate Tuesday endorsed a plan that would send the nation's growing stockpiles of radioactive nuclear waste to a central repository burrowed in Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

The decision was 20 years and $7 billion in the making, and championed by both the Bush administration and the energy industry, which poured millions into its passage.

But it comes saddled with troublesome questions about the safety of transporting the waste from 131 existing nuclear power plants -- including two in Connecticut -- during a time of unprecedented terrorist threats, as well as about the suitability of the mountain storage site and the influence of special interest money.

"This project at Yucca Mountain is a bad project. This is a road that shouldn't be traveled," said Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who quoted poet Robert Frost and talked himself nearly hoarse in a last-ditch effort to derail the Yucca proposal.

Republicans countered that the project had been well thought out over the past 20 years.

"There are not going to be any dangers in this," said minority leader Trent Lott, R-Miss.

In Nevada, government officials predicted that their fight against the plan, which would bring 77,000 tons of highly toxic waste to their state, has only just begun.

"This project is going down," said Bob Loux, of Gov. Kenny Guinn's office. "It's just a matter of when and how."

The key Senate action Tuesday came on a motion to proceed to a final vote on the Yucca measure; it passed, 60-39. The Senate then passed an unrecorded voice vote in favor of the site.

The House voted 306-117 in May to endorse the Yucca plan.

Now the Bush administration can submit the proposal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for licensing, a process that could take more than four years. Even with an optimistic approval and construction timetable, the Yucca repository, which is supposed to hold nuclear waste safely for 10,000 years, wouldn't open for a decade.

Still, it probably would be the first centralized underground nuclear waste repository in the world, at a cost of some $60 billion -- the largest public works project ever.

"On balance, I think this is the right decision to make," said Dodd, who voted "no" on the motion to proceed but "yes" on the voice vote.

Lieberman, who until late Tuesday afternoon had remained uncommitted, said later that the Yucca plan "gives the people of my state the false hope of a solution to this serious problem."

Until the Yucca site is ready, spent nuclear fuel would remain on the site of operating reactors, he said, and there is no plan to safely transport waste across Connecticut.

The Senate decision was hailed by the nuclear energy industry and by Republican leaders who forced the vote over the objections of the majority Democrats.

"This is a great day for U.S. energy security and common-sense environmentalism," said Joe F. Colvin, president and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade group representing 260 energy companies and organizations.

Former Nevada Gov. Bob List, now a lobbyist for the energy institute, said that he was surprised by how large and bipartisan the vote was and that Nevada must face reality.

"This project is quite obviously coming our way and, like it or not, we need to prepare and we need financial help to do that," he said. "We deserve consideration for taking on responsibility for the whole nation. That means some benefits and mitigation money and some help for a state that is clearly unable to do it on its own."

The Senate vote was a victory for President Bush, who had endorsed the Yucca project in February.

On Monday, the White House intervened to help pro-Yucca forces sew up the votes of Utah's two Republican senators, who had expressed concern about nuclear waste traveling through their state on the way to Nevada.

In a letter to Sens. Bob Bennett and Orrin Hatch, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham predicted that if the Yucca resolution failed, the nation's nuclear waste probably would be sent to Utah. The Skull Valley Goshute Indians have indicated a willingness to take spent nuclear fuel on their reservation, and private energy companies have been considering their offer.

In Nevada, activists who are battling the Yucca plan pledged to continue. And state officials said they believe they'll have better luck in the courts.

"The Department of Energy and the energy industry have had the upper hand in influencing the political process," Loux, of the governor's office, said. "The tougher road for them lies ahead in the courts where, for the first time, they will be held legally accountable for their decisions."

Peggy Maze Johnson, of the Nevada environmental group Citizen Alert, said senators were "blinded by the dollars of the nuclear energy industry."

"It's amazing to me that the nuclear industry has more power than constituents," she said. "But we Nevadans have to stick together. We're going to make sure we move forward on the lawsuits.